Saturday, July 07, 2012

McMahon And The Editorial Boards

Linda McMahon, now engaged in a Republican Party primary
with former U.S. Representative Chris Shays, has been around the Connecticut editorial
board block before when she ran on the Republican ticket against then Attorney
General Richard Blumenthal.

Mr. Blumenthal had earned some twenty years of fawning
commentary chits collected from Editorial Board Writers (EBW) and commentators,
and it was plain from much of the adoring press reports issuing from the
attorney general’s office, many of them put into print with little or no editing,
that he had cashed them in during his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

So then, Mrs. McMahon (LM in the imaginary dialogue below) knows
there are wolves dressed in wolves’ clothing out there eager to pounce.

EBW: Quick now: Do you think the United States should
assist, behind the scenes of course, in overthrowing Yahya Jammeh?

LM: What?

Perhaps the easiest questions to handle are those
surrounding World Wide Entertainment (WWE).

EBW: What about the pornography issue, Mrs. McMahon?

LM: It’s not porn, but WWE fixed all that.

EBW: Should lawyers from WWE have threatened to sue a
political commentator for having exercised his constitutional right to say that
the company you once served as CEO was engaging in pornography?

LM: The statement is not true, and corporations have a
responsibility to protect their brands from questionable assertions. But the
answer to your question is – No.

EBW: Well, do you plan to relay your opinion to your husband
and WWE lawyers?

LM: I just did. I’ve always been partial to Dick the Butcher’s view of lawyers.
You remember your Shakespeare: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
I shouldn’t be so hard on them. They do perform a well-paid sometimes necessary
service. And if we shot them all, the halls of Congress would soon come to
resemble the sadly diminished staffs of Connecticut newspapers, which, come to
think of it, might not be a tragedy after all… Wait a sec: I’ve just had a
mental flash on Yayah, and – Yes – the United States should work quietly in the
background to rid post-colonial states of pestiferous dictators, though I am
not quite ready to send the drones in on them. You haven’t yet asked me any
questions on the economy, still stuck in low dive. Here are some figures taken
from an article written by Jonah Goldberg of National Review that could be
obtained by any curious editorial board writer from any number of sources: From
the end of World War II to the beginning of the Obama administration, federal
spending had never exceeded 23.5 percent of the Gross National Product (GDP).
The average for the Bush years was 19.6 percent. The U.S. broke 25 percent in
2009 because of measures initiated by Bush and afterwards augmented by Obama.
In the last four years, we have added $6.3 trillion in federal debt, $5
trillion on Obama’s watch. Debt held by the public in 2008 was 40.5 percent of
GDP. The debt today is an alarming 74.2 percent and rising…

LM: Excuse me… These are indisputably accurate measurements
of spending increases. Everyone running for Congress this year and everyone
writing about the economy should be aware of these figures. And no one should
be allowed to pass through the doors of Congress following the election without
having proposed a plan to reduce those percentages. I hope your next question
is: What’s your spending reduction plan – because our time for this interview
is running short, and the nation is on its knees praying for spending relief.
When the time comes for you to interview U.S. Rep Chris Murphy [the likely
winner in the Democratic primary for the U.S Senate], you might ask him why his
party has not produced a passable budget since the beginning of the Obama
administration – even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the
presidency. If the budget is kicked down the road by means of continuing resolutions,
you can’t control spending.

One feels tempted to shout in Mrs. McMahon’s ear: Get thee
to an editorial board.

My best guess – and I must confess that I have no access to
inside information from the McMahon camp – is that Mrs. McMahon is being held
prisoner by her Beltway staff and advisors, possibly some lawyers, who may have
told her: “Now look here, Linda, we absolutely forbid you to throw around the
silverware until the Republican primaries are over, and this for the best of
reasons: You are going to win the primary without firing a shot at Mr. Shays.
After that -- game’s on. Go kick butt.”

Never having been a paid political consultant, I do not know
whether such advice is good or bad politics, if it has been proffered.

I do know that left of center editorial board writers are
waiting anxiously to plant their progressive hobnailed boots on Mrs. McMahon’s
face.

Mrs. McMahon should give them the opportunity to howl and
stamp their feet and yelp and moan. People in Connecticut, as she well knows
from her glory days in WWE, love a gaudy political show almost as much as they
like mud wrestling contests and the soft porn endemic in widely viewed and
popular nipple showing Madonna concerts.